The following article, co-authored with Rahul Tongia, originally appeared in Mint on May 30, 2019. An excerpt is below and the full text can be accessed here.
As a second Narendra Modi government takes office, the
demands it will face to deploy its renewed political capital will be immense.
In every area of policy priority—from education and financial inclusion, to
health and infrastructure, and energy and defence—an impatient electorate will
expect it to deliver. But every policy challenge must necessarily confront
trade-offs, even before further complications arise from bureaucratic or party
politics.
There’s a popular adage in the tech world: “Cheaper,
faster, better. Pick any two." This applies widely to Indian policy, a
field where it sometimes assumes the form of a variant: “Cheaper, more, better.
Pick any two."
Given India’s human development imperatives, the natural
policy impulse has usually been to rush towards providing healthcare, energy
access, infrastructure and education on a vast scale. Most evaluations of
policy have focused on input measures: How much of a certain public good can be
built, deployed, or delivered? Recent examples include the opening of bank
accounts as part of Jan Dhan Yojana or household electrification. How such bank
accounts are being used or how consistent the supply of electricity on a new
connection is, are understandably not the immediate priority.
Moreover, given historical resource scarcity, a second
Indian government priority has been to focus on achieving its objectives
cheaply. In public tender issuing and procurement—which dictates a lot of
public service delivery in India—this has manifested itself in a rigid focus on
the lowest-cost bids, known as L1. Together, the emphasis on “more" and
“cheaper" has almost always meant that “better" has been sacrificed.
But India has changed. In many policy fields, the
challenge of “more" is now being addressed: school enrolment is near full
potential, there is surplus power generation supply, housing is readily
available but remains vacant, allocated capital budgets for defence are not
spent in their entirety, and agricultural yields in certain crops have exceeded
demand (resulting in drops in prices and farmer distress). The question of
limited financial resources, while still a constraint, is less relevant today,
in part due to better tax revenue collection, a natural consequence of the
goods and services tax (GST) and digitization. The India of 2019 is no longer
as resource-starved it was in the 1970s or 1960s.